Brontës in perspective

Visit Haworth, and your encounter with the Brontës begins long before you enter the parsonage. It starts with the sharp wind that nibbles your face and fingers in the car park; it continues with the watery sunshine shimmering on the front of the building where Charlotte and her siblings Emily, Anne and Branwell were raised, the vicar’s children. Because on this hillside, as exposed now as it was in the 1800s when the family lived there, the weather changed everything. No wonder Jane Eyre’s opening is all about the weather: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day … the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.”Walking the paths the Brontës